‘It is about creating something again, about reinventing and breathing life into masterpieces we know from the past.’ Thus Zlata Chochieva sets out her stall for this selection of 21 transcriptions from the three great pianist-composers whom she admires most.

Right from the first note, you realise Chochieva has not just drifted into the studio on a whim or simply to fulfil a contract. This is music-making of real purpose and conviction. She opens with Rachmaninov’s transcription of three of the six movements from Bach’s Violin Partita in E, BWV1006 – and she does so at a blistering pace. There is no attempt to daintify the 20th century’s conflation of the 18th, as Daniil Trifonov did a while back (DG, 11/18). Chochieva takes no prisoners in this exuberant reading, continued in the three Bach-Friedman arrangements that follow. Octave bass figures thunder out, her left hand always richly voiced (as is the Russian way), underpinning the dancing upper parts in the Vivo movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3. Friedman’s take on the Siciliano from the Flute Sonata BWV1031 provides a welcome change from the better-known transcription by Wilhelm Kempff (familiar from Dinu Lipatti’s famous recording), just as the Bourrée from the B minor Violin Partita is a less familiar arrangement than that by Saint-Saëns (captured in another celebrated recording by Ossip Gabrilowitsch in 1925).

The four Schubert-Liszt and three Mendelssohn-Liszt transcriptions are nicely contrasted – a feature of the entire programme – even though Chochieva might be a little too robust for some tastes at times; but few would demur over her breathtaking dispatch of the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Rachmaninov’s notoriously tricky version. Not being a fan of symphonic Mahler transferred to the keyboard, I was not entirely convinced by Friedman’s recreation, though it is certainly a technical tour de force. In another rarely heard transcription by the Polish master, the Adagio from a harpsichord sonata by Giovanni Grazioli (1746-1820), Chochieva makes the wise decision not to observe the repeats (unlike Joseph Banowetz in his appealing all hyphenated-Friedman recital – Grand Piano, 10/16). She ends with the first of the six Gärtner-Friedman waltzes – an encore, as it were, after all these encores. Such Weltschmerz. I should like to hear Chochieva in the other five. Or in anything else she cares to play.